The present invention relates generally to hierarchical management systems and more particularly to reducing the overhead associated with maintaining hierarchical management systems.
Conventional hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems manage objects residing in an online-accessible repository as well as an offline repository. Reasons for moving objects from the online-accessible repository to the offline repository may be, inter alia, the object is out of date, the object is currently of limited value, there is a finite amount of space in the online-accessible repository, etc. However, there usually is a chance the moved object will be requested at least once in the future. Therefore, a pointer is placed in the online-accessible repository pointing to the moved object residing in the offline repository. The pointer allows for access to the object without storing said object in the finite space of the online-accessible repository.
Due to the ever-increasing production of data, the number of objects stored in an online accessible repository such as a file systems also grows. While one million files were rarely seen on file systems merely ten (10) years ago, today HSM systems manage tens of millions of files with a trend towards billions of files. As a result current HSM systems require an ever increasing number of pointers to accommodate the influx of data.